by A. S. Byatt
“Sit down.”
“If there was any music, I could keep still and listen.”
“There isn’t.”
“I’m making you angry. Look into my eyes. I am the one you haven’t kissed, the body you don’t know. Is it delectable or terrible to look at the same thing and know you don’t know it, although you do?”
“I think you’d better go. I have things to do.”
“Aren’t you curious to see if it’s the same, or different? Same face, same voice. Same kiss? Shall I kiss you, so you know whether it’s the same, or different?”
Frederica sits and sips Nescafé out of a black mug with a rose-pink lining, salvaged from Cambridge, retrieved from Freyasgarth. What is disturbing is the sameness, not the difference. John Ottokar can be still and gentle, like a great lazy cat, and this one cannot, his fingers move nervously on his knees, which tremble together; his head tosses imperceptibly to some tune that twangs in his brain. But the smile is John’s smile, and the eyes are John’s eyes, and the fingers are John’s fingers, and the voice, with its clarity and warmth, the voice is John’s voice.
She says, “I don’t want to know. I think you ought to go. I’ll work out what I feel about John with John, if that’s what he wants.”
“He won’t mind, if you kiss me. He’ll expect it. We come as two sides of one coin, two faces of one herm. He knows that. Dear frowning Frederica, his kiss is not complete without my kiss, either for him, or for you, and he knows that. Don’t be cross. Kiss me. He knows I am here, now, he knows I am here, he expects this. We always know. Take one, take both. He knows I will be here. Reject one, reject both. It might be better. We might be too much for you.”
“You might,” says Frederica. “You well might. But I’ll discuss that with John.”
“When I’m gone,” he says, rising abruptly, “you’ll be sorry, you’ll desperately want to know what I’m like, you’ll ache.”
“I’ll take my chance.”
“You don’t take chances. You’re cold, you’re canny, you’ll never hold him with that grismal frown. You’ll bore the pants off him.”
“I really do think you’d better go.”
He goes.
Next time he comes, it is as if this conversation had never taken place. The figure waiting by the steps of Number 42 is sober-suited, in one of those collarless suits made fashionable by the Beatles, but in sober midnight-blue, over a white polo neck. Frederica, at the same instant, experiences a lurch of sexual delight, and makes an intellectual observation that this is almost certainly Paul.
“I’m sorry to bother you,” he says. “I’m sorry to intrude, but I should be grateful for some professional advice, if you could spare me a moment or two.”
“Come in,” says Frederica.
“The thing is,” says Paul Ottokar, once they are well in the basement, resuming his prowling, “the thing is, that the little group I belong to—not Zag and the Zy-Goats, which doesn’t interest you, because you aren’t musical, but the little spiritual splinter-group or spearhead—we are having a Poetry Weekend, and as my brother has no doubt told you, we—he and I—are dreadfully ill-read animals, and I don’t know where to start my reading for this weekend. We are going to be called the Spirits’ Tigers, I think, and someone called Richmond Bly is going to come and talk to us about ‘The Visionary Aspects of English Romanticism.’ Now I haven’t the vaguest idea what all that is—but I do pick things up very quickly, as you may have observed—I got a lot out of The Birth of Tragedy from the Spirit of Music, I nicked dear John’s copy—he knows, of course, I expect he felt it rising off his desk and going into my satchel, we’re like that, we have kinetic knowledge of each other. So I thought I’d come to you for a reading list of essential English Romanticism for this weekend. So I can surprise Elvet Gander—I love surprising Elvet—there will be a poet there called Fainlight, I think, and a performance artist called Silo, who plays the drums with Zag and the Zy-Goats. Is it an impossible request? Can you make me a shopping list or batting order of English Romanticism? It will be good for my rather unenlightened soul.”
“I could do that,” says Frederica.
“I can’t make head or tail of the Visions of the Daughters of Albion, I thought of chanting them. Like mantras. With bells and a drum and a wailing of thin horn music.”
• • •
Frederica sits and writes. She writes down “Kubla Khan,” The Ancient Mariner, “The Immortality Ode,” “The Death of Hyperion.” Paul Ottokar says, “I hope I wasn’t offensive, last time. I was high. If I was offensive, please don’t be offended. I should like us to be friends. In a minor key.”
“Do you want a list of criticisms, or just of texts?”
“Whatever you think. I am in your hands.”
Frederica writes. She wants to ask: And will John be coming to your Poetry Weekend? She does not ask.
“I’ll make you a cup of coffee, whilst you write,” says Paul Ottokar. He finds her kettle, her coffee, her cups, her milk, without hesitation. He finds Leo’s biscuits iced with smiley faces, cherry-coloured, lemon-coloured, coffee-coloured, chocolate. He puts them out on a plate with Peter Rabbit and Benjamin Bunny. Frederica writes: Thomas de Quincey: Confessions of an English Opium-Eater, and accepts her own smiley biscuit, on her own plate, from the gently courteous intruder. She feels like crying.
John Ottokar telephones. He sounds strained. He talks about nothing much for a good five minutes and then says, “Can I come and see you?”
“When?” says Frederica.
“Over the weekend,” says John Ottokar.
“Leo is going to his father this weekend.”
“Then I’ll come,” says John Ottokar.
Frederica does not say then: “But there is a Poetry Weekend in Four Pence.” She feels wise, and restrained, not to say this. She washes her hair, and makes the bed with clean sheets, and buys supper, supper that won’t spoil, smoked trout and salad, a lemon tart. When John Ottokar arrives he is wearing his Liberty shirt with the green chrysanthemums and a collarless jacket in green baize, bottle-green, bound in dark blue. He has, despite these bright garments, a faded look to Frederica’s eye. As though the other were brighter, sharper, clearer, more extreme than this one. Frederica searches his face for differences, and he sits there, over the dinner table, a little stony, a little guarded, undergoing her scrutiny as though it was exactly what he expected. He speaks rather doggedly of events in his world of work: Tony Benn’s policy on North Sea oil, the balance-of-payments problems that loom. He looks around the basement room and says, “It’s good to be here.”
“I thought you would be busy with a Poetry Weekend.”
“Ah,” says John Ottokar. He puts down his knife and fork. He stands up and goes over to the basement window and looks out at the dark well.
“I think, Frederica, it might save us all a lot of pain and trouble if I were to put on my coat now, and go, and never come back. The alternative is pretty dreadful for both of us. It starts here. Either I ask you—what’s he been saying, what’s he been doing, what did you answer, what did you do?—or I don’t, I keep quiet, and both of us imagine—you and me, that is—and he becomes a huge—a huge—a demon between us. I know now, you aren’t looking at me—not me—you’re looking at both of us, comparing, wondering. Your memories are all mixed up—which one smiled that smile, which one liked that poem, perhaps. Probably both did. Tearing ourselves apart is an act of violence, Frederica, an unnatural act in a sort of a way. You don’t want all that. And I want you to myself, or not at all.”
“What does he want?”
“To have what I have.”
“At the same time as you, or instead of you?”
“That’s a good question. At the same time, but better. He’d like both of us to make love to you, and he would be the one to do it better.”
“And none of that is up to me?”
“Oh, some of it is, yes. But some of it isn’t. I thought I would get away—from him—and
I can’t—there are reasons why I can’t—good reasons—but I want my own life.”
“Can’t he get a girl of his own?”
“He wants mine. Whoever she is. And I—don’t want that. That is between us, that is a difference.”
Frederica says, “You can’t just let him win. That isn’t good for either of you.”
“But you must see—as for you—I want you—and what I don’t want, is for you to have to fight him—or be fought over—or have anything to do with all that. I want you to be you—as I first saw you—all thin and nervy standing there talking about the ‘form of consecutive prose’ wasn’t it, with your eyes lit up, and your mind following a thread with a kind of single-minded glee—I thought, if I could get her to look at me, like that, to think about me with that sort of concentration.”
“I do. I am. I do.”
“You might have done.”
“I do.”
She stands behind him, and puts her arms round him. He is trembling.
“I won’t be beaten,” she says, “I’m a fighter, you know that. We can’t be beaten. We must think our way through all this. I can lock him out.”
He trembles more violently. “No,” he says, “that won’t work.”
“You,” says Frederica furiously, “you have got to know where I stand. You have got to stop being gloomy, and fight. You can’t just walk out on me, having just walked in, because he’s trying to walk in too. Did you let him have everything he was trying to take, when you were little? The cake, the tricycle, the little knife?”
“Oh yes. I always let him. There was always another, somewhere, I could have, until he came and wanted it.”
“Well, there isn’t another Frederica Potter. There is one of me and one only. I am I, and inseparable from myself, and indivisible into equal or unequal halves. And at the moment I want you, and you are what I want, unless you go on being gloomy and renunciatory, in which case I shall get depressed—but then he won’t get me, John Ottokar, neither of you will. It’s up to you. Only, I warn you, I warn you, I will not be a soft ball you toss between you, I will not be talked about or shared out in my absence, I will live my own life, which, just at the moment, I choose shall include you. End of speech.”
John Ottokar turns away from the window and takes her in his arms. He sighs.
“Come to bed,” says Frederica. She turns to pull down the blind and for a moment thinks she sees a blond figure in a dark PVC raincoat standing patiently outside the window. She puts her face to the glass, and there is nothing. She pulls down the blind, and holds out her arms. Whoever wants to see two merged shadows on the translucent cloth can see them. She begins to unbutton John Ottokar’s shirt.
They make love. Most of that night, and most of the next day, with the blind drawn down, they make love. They make love in deepening silence, broken only by the odd squeak and suck of skin, the odd bird-like cry, the odd rustle of hair on cotton sheet, of finger- and toenails braced against flesh and bedclothes. They explore each other’s bodies, diligently, companionably, leisurely, with little fits of reciprocal fury, with slow, slow holdings back and rapid provocations. She learns his many tastes, his dryness and damp, his sleekest surfaces and his roughest. She learns him as though he were inside her skin, as though she were inside his. No two can be closer, no two assemblies of living cells can be so confounded, so intertwined: they wind sinuously about each other like snakes, they buck like goats, they swallow like silent fish in the deep, they follow delectable rancid scents like cats in the jungle. They eat, are eaten, fling back free a while and separate on drenched bedclothes. Both the body’s hope and the mind’s fear of the fusion of cells somewhere in there, in the pulling and gripping dark, are absent: they may do as they please, only to please, because they are protected by the Pill. What Frederica delights in most is the warmth of flat belly against flat belly, the push of pelvis against pelvis. When they pull away in the morning light, she touches his skin and finds it is bloody; she touches her own, and her fingertip is scarlet. “Look at us,” she says. They are like painted savages, streaked and smeared with warm and drying blood, spread thin like ruddy paint, in whorls and runnels, palm-prints and traced loin-cloths, which reflect each other, body and body. It is her own blood, the blood of the seeping, “break-through” bleeding produced by the Pill in odd gouts and sprinklings, nothing to do with the old rhythms of fertility. Frederica looks to see if John Ottokar feels distaste for this body-paint, but he is tracing its contours with his own finger, smiling.
“Signed in blood,” he says. “You can read me on you and you on me.”
“Like savages. A rite of passage.”
“Does it hurt?”
“No. It’s lovely. It’s warm. A glow.”
They are whispering. Above their heads, Saskia’s footsteps trot and stop: Agatha calls out, the words inaudible.
“I’ve marked you,” he says. “We’ve marked each other.”
“Let’s never move,” she says, but this is an artificial note, this breaks the spell, for in the end they must move, and they know it.
“Are you happy?” she says, like all lovers, and he answers, “Completely,” one lovely hand heavy on the sharp edge of her haunch.
For whatever reason, this visit of John’s puts an end to the visits of Paul, at least for a time. Frederica wonders if Paul knows, in some way, and the knowledge keeps him away. Knows what? she wonders, a week or two later, when the red glow has been washed off her skin and has cooled and faded a little—only a little—in her memory. For she does not know, she does not exactly want, or need, to know, what she and John Ottokar intend, or desire. Frederica has told no one but Agatha about John Ottokar, and Agatha very little. John Ottokar as a secret, as a hidden pleasure, is nothing to do with her and Leo’s future. But she is not free, as once she was, to feel her way in and out of loves and likings. For Leo watches her, calculating, jealous, wondering what she wants, what she plans, and his watching, like Paul’s quite different watching, weighs on her. And although in the early summer Frederica does not see Paul, she realises that Leo does, or has.
“I smelt that bad smell of that smiley man again today,” says Leo. And, “That man with the smell came by and looked in.”
She cannot mention this to John. She does not know what to make of it. She is nervous.
She dreams she is in bed with two men, one red, one white, made of hot stone, with stone erections tipped with drops of blood (the white man) and white drops of semen (the red one). They turn to her, they lay their heavy arms across her chest, crushing her. They mount half of her, a thigh one side, a thigh the other. They are heavy, they crush her, she cannot cry out. She wakes. She is afraid. She is rather pleased with the energy and simplicity of the dream-forms, as though they were a work of art she had deliberately constructed.
XVII
Dear John,
I write this letter only after much deliberation. There is a convention amongst psychoanalysts to put it at its lowest—in certain circumstances it bears a resemblance to a TABOO—there is a convention that it is “not done,” may be injurious, to approach the relatives and lovers and associates of any “patient,” with or without that “patient’s” consent. Conventional psychoanalytic treatment is a relationship between two people, analyst and analysand—other relationships are worked out within that framework.
As you know, and as I know you know, I am “treating” your brother for what have been diagnosed as “manic-depressive episodes.” As I believe you also know, I am in considerable sympathy with those new, and I believe promising, I will go so far as to say exciting ideas, thought-patterns, hypotheses, which suggest that we should look on unusual manifestations of the psyche not as aberrations from a specified norm (What is normal? Who dictates what we shall take as our norm?) but as ways of exploring the spirit, of exploring the pain, the Experience of the soul in a damaged and damaging environment. I do not, in other words, see your brother as a “sick man” in need of a “cure.” But he is un
doubtedly a perturbed spirit, undergoing, passing through, a kind of psychic electrical storm, in which great bolts of lightning “all sweating, tilt about the watery heaven,” and he could be empowered or destroyed by these fiery currents.
I was pleased—pleased is a trivial word, I mean to say, and should say, joyful, to find Paul, or Zag as he prefers to be known, as a participant in the Meetings of the Spirits’ Tigers. The good old Quaker word “Meeting” does suggest what these gatherings are meant to be, and one of the purposes of the Meetings is to restore to the spiritual group the energy, the violence even, which, as Christopher Levenson said in his poem from which we took our name, has slowly over the centuries leached away from the original Pentecostal waitings on the Inner Light. The Quakers no longer quake: the disciples no longer speak with tongues: the Inner Light is dimmed: “the Spirits’ Tigers are grown tame.” It is entirely good that we few should come together to reverse this entry, to generate energy, heat and light, to make each other as far as possible whole in the spirit, at least to empower those of us who are lost, or wandering, or crashed. I believe Zag’s choice to make one in these Many is a wise choice and to be supported. I believe the group—the Meeting—has been constituted by a wisdom and a purpose beyond the random needs of its individual members.
Now, what has this to do with me? you will ask. Or you will not ask, you will despise my rhetorical attributed question, for you know very well in part—but not I think, in its wholeness—what I am going to say to you, to request of you, to lay on you, in the vulgar tongue of our times.
As I was delighted to see Zag bathed in the light of the silence of the Tigers, so I was, on the two brief occasions when we met, overjoyed to see you. Your presence relaxed and calmed him; you brought a serenity to the Meeting which was good for others besides Zag; I think maybe the depth of the silent contemplation did you some good too, or so it appeared.
But you have not come to the last few meetings, and you have not answered the letters that have been sent to you. Zag says he believes you have “given up on him” and also “given up on the Tigers.”
